Critical incident #4: Bathroom breaks and attendance

One of the joys of teaching at university compared with teaching younger people in schools is that by and large discipline is less of an issue. While I hear that secondary school teachers spend much of their time controlling the class and using disciplinary techniques, at university level the students tend to behave quite well and I can focus on teaching and learning.

However, this is not always the case and I noticed in class this week that requests for toilet breaks often caused problems. In a double class of 1 hour 45 minutes it’s not unreasonable that some students may need to go to the bathroom. However, it can be quite disruptive in classes where group or paired work is used regularly and tasks flow into each other so even missing five minutes is problematic.

In my class this week, a total of five students requested toilet breaks and at one point three members of a table of four were outside the class. These students (all male) were outside for around 15 minutes, apparently also buying water.

It was my first lesson with this class and I decided something needed to be said to try to nip this in the bud. It’s a difficult subject to address. I have never refused a student request to go to the toilet but when so many students leave and stay outside for a length of time, they are clearly taking advantage.

I impressed upon them the need to get refreshment before class, to bring water to class, and also to use the toilet before the class. They were all Arabic students and generally responded quite compliantly. However, some immediately requested a break in the middle of the class. I had incorporated a ten-minute break into double periods the previous year and found that students invariably took a longer break and it would often lead to 20 minutes being either missed or disrupted.

I wouldn’t expect toilet breaks to be a problem at university level but when you consider that most of the students are aged around 18, have never been away from home before, and are studying in an environment which is largely more lenient than the strict protocols they were used to in high school, then it’s not very surprising. I have decided to continue to address the issue in future classes by impressing the need to get refreshment and take bathroom breaks before class, but whether this is successful remains to be seen.

The issue is a symptom of a wider problem of attendance. The college has recently changed its attendance policy quite drastically. Last year, no student should have been admitted more than 15 minutes after the beginning of the class. This rule was quite strictly enforced and resulted in many students being turned away and marked absent if they arrived after 15 minutes. Additionally, it led to students deciding not to come to class at all if they felt they were going to be late. They would be marked absent for both periods in a double class too.

It was decided at a higher level that, mainly due to compliance reasons, the policy had to be changed so that if there was any contact at all with the student, they would be marked as ‘late but present’. Now it is possible for students to arrive at any point in a double class and be marked ‘late but present’ – even arriving 5 minutes before the end. This has created its own problems with students far more frequently arriving half an hour late to class, aware that they would receive a late rather than an absence as would previously have been the case.

We discussed as a department the negative repercussions of this and it was decided that teachers could use, if they felt it was needed, a form for the student to fill in to explain persistent lateness and, if it persisted further, to refer the student for a meeting with the head of department. We have yet to see if this policy will yield results but we hope that the demonstration of tangible consequences to lateness will have a positive effect on attendance.

Even in ESL at university level, awareness of disciplinary methods and procedures is very important to the smooth running of the class. In my experience, if students are given too much slack they will take advantage so firm rules and consequences are important to enforce to keep the classes running as well as possible.

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